Tuesday, January 27, 2015

There is nothing wrong with description, watching people pass by, remembering how things used to be. I suppose it’s always like that. On the other hand,

there is no
exact
description

of what
is wrong with
my hat

*

We say an expression misleads us, that we have been given “bad directions,” ending up in a tight corner of the cloakroom, a bright orange bowling ball now speeding toward us,

Wang Wang Blues
on the

floormodel radio

*

Then the news is so matter-of-fact that there is no news, just years of patient inventory,

bread milk and snow

*

Snow what is
snowing

blank
y brillante

now I
have it

hat hat
glove

[I wrote “What I Forgot” sometime in the 1990s. The poem was published in a chapbook of my work, Inventories (Oasii Press, 1997). Now I know why the trio bread milk and snow has been running through my head. “Wang Wang Blues”: an early Ellington recording.]

This publication was part of the fugitive gift-economy of small-press poetry. No bar codes, no store shelves. I have a few copies still; send me your name and address and I’ll send you one. My e-mail address is in the sidebar under the photo.

“Orange Crate Art” is a song by Van Dyke Parks and the title of a 1995 album by Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson. “Orange Crate Art” is for me one of the great American songs: “Orange crate art was a place to start.”

Don’t look for premiums orcoupons, as the cost ofthe thoughts blended inORANGE CRATE ART pro-hibits the use of them.